Talk:Macintosh OSX Service Notes
Mac Equivalent of the Windows Registry
For typical macOS applications the place for this kind of information is one of
- /System/Library (for OS specific stuff)
- /Library (for system-wide preferences/settings valid for all users)
- ~/Library (for user-specific preferences/settings)
and the folders beneath them (e.g. Application Support and Preferences).
They are saved as individual files, usually named so you can identify them and with a structure which is (at least most of the time) understandable by mere humans. Most of these files are Property List files ending in .plist which can be pretty-printed into a human-readable form by running plutil -p NAME-OF-FILE.plist in Terminal.
How to speed up a slow Mac
Macs don’t need to be defragged
Mac do not need to be defragmented because the file system (initially HFS+ and more recently APFS) prevents fragmentation and automatically defrags files if necessary - if the file has more than eight fragments, or is smaller than 20MB, it will be automatically defragged.
Apple introduced APFS (Apple File System) in High Sierra in 2017. APFS automatically defragments your drive on the fly by creating snapshots of files so you can access different versions of the same files.
